The present invention relates generally to storage systems and, more particularly, to resource provisioning, especially for virtual machine (VM) involving server virtualization technology and storage area network (SAN).
Server virtualization technology allows the system administrator to deploy a number of virtual server instances or virtual machines (VM) on a single physical server. These VMs connect to a storage subsystem via SAN in order to access one or more storage volumes in the storage subsystem. Server virtualization allows the system administrator to deploy server instance as VM in a short term or time frame, because they do not need to install a physical device to deploy the server instance. As a result, the situation arises in which a customer tends to require the system administrator to deploy a lot of VMs in a very short term.
System administrators who manage a server virtualization environment have to provision proper resources (including, e.g., CPU, memory, I/O bandwidth, QoS, storage volume, and the like) to many VMs, SANs, and storage subsystems as fast as the customers demand.
Today, Fibre Channel (FC) is the most popular protocol for SAN. FC uses WWN (World Wide Name) to identify each node on the SAN (host computer, storage subsystem). Each node has an HBA (Host Bus Adapter) connected to the SAN, and each HBA has a unique WWPN (World Wide Port Name). The connection between a host computer and a storage subsystem is established by using each WWPN. The host computer also uses WWPN to identify each storage subsystem to which the host computer wants to connect.
In order to provision resources end to end (VM˜SAN˜storage subsystem), each VM has its own WWPN. NPIV (N_Port ID Virtualization) technology allows the HBA of the VM to have a virtual WWPN. The virtual WWPN is not a static, physical identifier like WWPN on the physical HBA. Instead, the system administrator can create a virtual WWPN and assign it to a physical HBA and virtual WWPN can be moved onto another physical HBA.
Using current solutions, the host side components (hypervisor, host OS or HBA) will create a virtual WWPN for each VM when a new VM creation occurs. After virtual WWPN creation, the system administrator can set up the SAN (zoning, QoS, etc.) and the storage subsystem (LUN Masking, QoS, etc.). This involves the following steps:
1) Create new VM
2) Create new virtual WWPN for VM
3) Setup SAN
4) Setup storage subsystem
5) Start VM
SAN and storage subsystem setup have to be done before starting VM and after virtual WWPN creation. The above approach of current solutions requires the system administrator to touch host side components at least twice. This is not an efficient way to complete the required amount of resource provisioning in a short term for the VM˜SAN˜storage subsystem environment using NPIV. Additionally, if there are plural hosts, there is no method to detect duplicate virtual WWPN creation. Significantly, duplicated virtual WWPN is not allowed into SAN.